Monday, July 21, 2014

Google Play Game Services

A few days ago I finished adding Google Play Game Services to my app, and I wanted to make a quick post about an issue I ran into.

The problem that I had was not mentioned anywhere in the Getting Started guide, and apparently it's not a very common one. It took me a few hours before I finally found the answer online, in a StackOverflow answer that was sitting at the bottom of the page with 0 points.

Specifically, the problem was that whenever I would try to log in to the game services, I would get an error that simply said: "Unknown issue with Google Play Services." The log output wasn't much more helpful, it just said "Internal error, see log for details." So I had to find the actual error in the unfiltered logs (which is a challenge in itself), which said: "Access Not Configured. Please use Google Developers Console to activate the API for your project." This didn't really help, because Google had already activated the API's that I was supposed to need.

So I went back to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I followed the Getting Started guide to the letter. This is important, because there are actually a lot of things that can go wrong, and they are all pretty easy to miss. I double and triple checked all of the common problems. Nope.

Eventually I went back to look at the error message again. The error also included a link to a troubleshooting page, but I had already looked over all of the solutions it offered. However, this time I realized that the link was not to a Google Play troubleshooting page, but a Google Drive troubleshooting page. So I just decided to activate the Drive API on the off chance that it would work. And wouldn't you know, that was the problem! I eventually found this solution in a neglected StackOverflow answer, although I'm still not 100% sure why it was necessary. It automatically activated the other API's, even though I don't need half of them, so why doesn't it just activate the Drive API as well?